1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a blade server and more specifically, to a fastener that secures a thermal module and a motherboard to a metal face panel, which uses a locating member, a cushion member, a spacer member and a lock member to fasten a thermal module and a metal face panel to a motherboard, keeping the thermal module electrically insolated from the metal face panel and in close contact with a chip at the motherboard for quick dissipation of heat. The spacer member is elastically compressible and electrically insulative, therefore the spacer member automatically adjusts the tightness between the thermal module and the chip at the motherboard, and isolates the digital grounding loop formed in the locating member and the thermal module from the analog grounding loop formed in the lock member and the metal face panel.
2. Description of the Related Art
At the present time, many enterprises install several tens or even several hundreds of mini servers to satisfy network traffic requirements. In order to improve further economic effect, blade servers are developed. A blade server is essentially a housing for a number of individual minimally-packaged computer motherboard “blades”. Each blade is a server in its own right, often dedicated to a single application, containing one or more processors, computer memory, computer storage, and computer network connections and controllers, and other input/output ports. Server blades share the common power supply and air-cooling resources of the chassis. Blade servers allow more processing power in less rack space, simplifying cabling and reducing power consumption. The most attractive advantage of a blade server is its high reliability and extendibility. Every blade server has the backup function. The chassis supports hot plugging of the blade servers and system component parts, providing high applicability. When one individual blade fails, another blade can take the place without interrupting the service of the system. When wishing to increase the processing power of the system, one needs only to insert more server blades and to arrange these resources at the place where the demand is most strong.
Further, in a regular ATCA blade server, dual-CPU architecture complicates heat dissipation arrangement. Installation of a thermal module in a regular ATCA blade server must consider the arrangement of dual-CPU, INTEL Xeon, one Northbridge chip, and two PXH chips. It is complicated to install a thermal module in a blade server. Directly mounting a thermal module on the motherboard of a blade server may cause the motherboard to deform or to break due to the heavy gravity weight of the thermal module. In order to protect the motherboard against deformation, a metal face panel may be used and provided at the bottom side of the motherboard to reinforce the structural strength of the motherboard.
According to ATCA protocol, the thermal module itself pertains to digital grounding and the metal face panel pertains to analog grounding. Digital grounding signal and analog grounding signal must be isolated, preventing interference. Therefore, blade server providers are trying hard to find a thermal module mounting arrangement that effectively secures a thermal module to a motherboard and a metal face panel, keeping the thermal module and the metal face panel electrically insulated from each other.